The International-Migration Network

Giorgio Fagiolo () and Marina Mastrorillo

LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: This paper studies international migration from a complex-network perspective. We define the international-migration network (IMN) as the weighted-directed graph where nodes are world countries and links account for the stock of migrants originated in a given country and living in another country at a given point in time. We characterize the binary and weighted architecture of the network and its evolution over time in the period 1960-2000. We find that the IMN is organized around a modular structure characterized by a small-world pattern displaying disassortativity and high clustering, with power-law distributed weighted-network statistics. We also show that a parsimonious gravity model of migration can account for most of observed IMN topological structure. Overall, our results suggest that socio-economic, geographical and political factors are more important than local-network properties in shaping the structure of the IMN.

Keywords: Migration; Complex Networks; International Migration Network; Community Detection; Gravity Models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2012/23

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